Howard Wen's had a fit of nostalgia lately. Sure, he's enjoying a plum assignment to seek out all that's new and interesting in Linux gaming, but this week, it's back to the past. Remember the golden age of adventure games? Two companies come to mind: Sierra On-Line and LucasArts. A project called FreeSCI is making it possible to run the old Sierra games on modern machines. Read more in FreeSCI: Rebuilding Sierra's Classic Quests. (Watch for an interview with FreeSCI developers soon.)

Dru Lavigne's always chasing down something interesting. This time, her latest column dares you to post your latest password in our Talkback section. Is she crazy, or just confident that One-Time Passwords have their advantages? You decide.

Speaking of trust, SSL is pretty important if you're doing trustworthy things over the Internet. Of course, going through the hassle of proving yourself to a public Certificate Authority can be annoying. Fortunately, OpenSSL gives you the means to create your own certificate. As he writes about in his new O'Reilly book, Linux Server Hacks, Rob Flickenger demonstrates Creating Your Own CA. (At the risk of sounding biased, this is a fantastic book.)

PHP folks rejoice, John Coggeshall is still around and kicking. This week, he explores Unix File Permissions. Just because you can create a file or directory in PHP doesn't mean your program knows what to do with it--or that other people can't do bad things with it. The Unix permission scheme is simple, once you get to know it.

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It'd be difficult to get through the day without pushing OSCON 2003 proposals again. Your naive and trusting editor has agreed to referee some PostgreSQL talks, so brainstorm, write, and submit proposals! Rest assured that, since the deadline is this Saturday, next week's newsletter will beg, plead, and cajole you to do something entirely different! Look forward to it!

ONLamp.com and Linux DevCenter Top Five Articles Last Week

FreeSCI: Rebuilding Sierra's Classic Quests
Few publishers were as important to adventure games as the
venerable Sierra On-Line. Their King's Quest, Space Quest, and
Leisure Suit Larry series paved the way for other fine
installments. Though Sierra has moved on, their games live on
through the FreeSCI project. Howard Wen explores how FreeSCI lets
you play your favorite old games -- and, just maybe, create new
ones.

Securing Systems with chroot
Recently, support was added to the NetBSD Operating System to run
the Network Time Protocol Daemon (ntpd) under an unprivileged user
ID in a chroot jail. In the first of two articles, Emmanuel
Dreyfus explains buffer overflows -- a typical Unix security flaw,
then explains a chroot jail and the motivation for running a
program in it.

Creating Your Own CA
Rob Flickenger, author of O'Reilly's recently released Linux
Server Hacks, shows you how to establish your own SSL Certificate
Authority using OpenSSL and a utility called CA.pl.

Systrace Policies
NetBSD and OpenBSD have an interesting new system policy manager
called systrace. With the proper policies, system administrators
can control which system calls can be made and how. Michael Lucas
explains how this works and how to understand -- and write -- a
good policy file.